Grabbing for the Python name, a hosting firm gets bitten

Who wouldn't want the sleek, muscular, menacing name "Python"? A small British hosting company, POBox Hosting, certainly did -- and decided it had the right to apply the slithering appellation to its new cloud computing offering, Python Cloud. POBox felt justified because its trading arm, Veber, had inherited the domain python.co.uk from work done about a decade ago.

That didn't sit well with the Python Software Foundation, a community-backed nonprofit based in the United States, which found itself in an escalating dispute with POBox over use of the Python name. The foundation asked for help in establishing that the Python trademark had been routinely used in Europe -- and a legal dispute that might have been a regional sideshow in any other industry became an international incident when the global open source community came to the foundation's aid.